Resident Cynic

The Resident Cynic: The Source of my Happiness

So what the hell am I talking about? It really comes down to breaking things down to a polygonal level. Doom 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004 both display drastically more polygons onscreen at any given time than Half-Life 2 does. A massive portion of the latter game's prettiness (and make no mistake, it's very pretty) comes from some seriously topnotch texture work. Some of the best I've ever seen, and I'm something of a texture connoisseur. The walls themselves, in most areas, are built around flat-slab BSP architecture, a la Quake 3 or, really, the original Half-Life. Just with more decoration and, as I said, better textures.

This is not a bad thing! For one, it means that the designers can focus on making their levels fun and atmospheric without having to worry about placing nine million little static mesh lights and doodads (all of which have to be properly set up with invisible bounding boxes lest the player get stuck on them). There are instances of complex architecture within the game, to be sure, but there are also large chunks where the basic layout is very much a lot of rectangular slabs.

Don't believe me? Check this development shot out. That boxy orange thing eventually becomes a part of the grim and atmospheric Nova Prospekt levels. In truth, this approach to architecture often helps the game ... human beings create architecture for function first, and form second (for the most part). Take a look at the shape of the rooms in your house. Most of them are rectangles, right? Maybe a bay window here or an L-shape there, but for the most part, it's a pretty simple layout, right?

The beauty of the design in Half-Life 2 is that, for the most part, it looks like a real world. This helps draw you in and brings a convincing, "Warsaw Ghetto" feel to City 17. It makes the player feel like he's been dropped into a living, breathing world instead of "a level" or "a mission."

I liked Doom 3. A lot. Far more than I ever expected to, to be honest. But it never felt like a world to me. It felt like a sequence of very pretty levels. Granted, I've never been to a base on Mars, and thus can't say for sure what one might look like. Maybe they nailed it exactly, but it's hard to tell. Similarly, the levels in Unreal Tournament 2004 feel like levels... which they SHOULD, since the concept of the game is that each area is an arena specifically built for combat. In both instances, the games use their available technology very well. Half-Life 2 is a different beast, but it manages to compete with (and in some ways surpass) these titles despite having architecture that is rarely as complex.

The moral of this story? Graphics fidelity and overall polygon count are only the beginning when it comes to creating levels for a game. The use of your resources is equally as important as what resources you have available.

Half-Life 2 and Bloodlines both do a lot of nifty stuff with the resources they have available. Go play them, and maybe for a few weeks at least, you won't have much to complain about either! Should you think of anything though, you can always Drop me a line and let me know.